SY_5sPL8WYlH0ImcdYx58pUime4 Relationships thru Social Media: Relationship News Articles Dealing with Social Media

Relationship News Articles Dealing with Social Media



Social media causing tension, jealousy in relationships



Published March 15, 2012  FoxNews.com

According to Dr. Scott Bea, a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, when social media and social lives intertwine, it creates jealousy in relationships.

“Imagine starting a dating relationship and you find out the guy that you’re involved with has 350 female friends,” Bea said. “I mean, it creates a whole new kind of stress. You have all of this competition that you might not have known about before.  It might not have existed before.”

A new study ranks the ways in which social media can cause stress in relationships.  The most cited cause of stress was sharing too much information on your profile page.  The second was tagging an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend in a photo.

Getting a friend request from an ex or finding incriminating information on partner’s walls or in their photos can also cause fights between couples.

In the past, it was much easier to keep secrets from a significant other, Bea said.  Now, couples have to get accustomed to a little less privacy.

“We weren’t built to think about the person we’re dating having so many other social contacts and friends that might compete with us,” he said. “We like that feeling of exclusivity, that we’re the one that matters first and foremost.”


Is Social Media Killing Personal Relationships?

by Jennifer Mattern on February 21, 2011 
Does social media interfere with building deeper relationships?
Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
Is the bite-sized world of social media leading to bite-sized and unsubstantial personal relationships? This was a question I asked myself recently when looking at some of my own relationships — friendship, romantic, professional, and family alike. Social media plays a role in many of those relationships these days, and what I noticed is that it isn’t always for the better.
Today let’s talk about how social media can inhibit the growth of deeper personal relationships with others, and then we’ll take a look at the other side of the coin and how social media can play a positive role as well.
How Social Media Might Inhibit the Growth of Personal Relationships

Here’s what I noticed when looking at my own relationships. Those that were heavily based in contact through social media outlets were much less substantial than those relationships where we kept in touch in person, over the phone, or via email on a regular basis. How those deeper relationships are maintained varied mostly based on physical distance.
For example, I have plenty of colleagues I consider friends. Many of them I keep in touch with solely through Twitter, social networks like LinkedIn, and blog comments. Those relationships tend to be much more casual, and we tend to know much less about each other. Once we hit the phase of emailing each other though, things change. Those relationships were much deeper than the social media based ones. We could have more private conversations. We could have longer conversations. And I found that people tended to open up much more about things unrelated to work via email than they did in social media.
The same was true with family. Those who keep in touch and work on maintaining a deeper personal connection generally turned to email, the phone, and in this case also snail mail. Those who only kept in touch via social media did so much more casually.
Sure, it’s possible this is exclusive to me and my network of personal and professional connections. But for it to affect so many people and relationships in that network similarly leads me to think otherwise, although that’s not to say there won’t be exceptions. You see, social media makes it easy to get to the point and move on. And it makes it easy to provide so much “fluff” information that information overload results and you just don’t care enough to want to know more mundane things about a person’s life. So you don’t reach deeper when communicating.
That might not be a bad thing on the professional side of things, but when it comes to more personal relationships I find it mildly concerning (and a good reason to make a better effort with friends and other loved ones). Do you reach out enough for the people you care about, or do you let social media suffice?
I do have to say that blogs are somewhat of an exception. They do give you a chance to get to know people better, because people can be as detailed as they want. However, that’s mostly on the consumption side. Comments still are frequently brief compared to posts, limited to the scope of the post, and buried is a mass of other comments depending on the blog.
quantity of conversations
Conversations and relationship-building: quality or quantity? - Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
How Social Media Might Improve Personal Relationships

Now that’s not to say that I think social media is killing personal relationships really. The only ones who can do that are ourselves if we slack off and stop making a decent effort just because social media is “easier.” In fact, I do think social media can do positive things in helping to build relationships — especially new ones.
Most importantly, I think social media tools have the ability to serve as a stepping stone to deeper and more personal relationships with those we want to build them with. For example, I’d known a particular freelance writing colleague for a while. And I knew she lived just a few towns over. We got to know each other mostly through blogs, but also kept in touch occasionally through Twitter. Because of that, we later met in person a couple of times. And at that point we really took the time to get to know each other better on a more personal level — discussing family, local shops, and such rather than solely work. In that case I like to think of social media as a sort of extended introduction.
What about you? How has social media affected different types of personal relationships in your life? Does it really bring you closer just because you might stay in touch more often, or is the quantity sometimes a substitute for quality conversations in those relationships? Share your own thoughts and stories in the comments below.

Article by Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern is a professional blogger and freelance business writer, and a former online PR and social media consultant. In addition to writing about social media issues at Social Implications, she also blogs about freelance writing, business writing, and indie publishing. She is currently working on a nonfiction book for freelance writers tentatively called The Query-Free Freelancer, and is the author of the Web Writer's Guide e-book series among other e-books. After launching a music PR firm in 2004, she moved quickly into online public relations and social media work due to the social Web savvy of the independent music client base. She continues to work actively in social media through her writing and blogging as well as through her own Web development projects...



Relationships on Facebook, Social Networks

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 31, 2009
Relationships on Facebook, Social NetworksA new research study evaluates details of relationships created on social networking sites to determine their significance, depth and potential.
Nancy Baym, a University of Kansas professor of communication studies, became interested early on in how the Internet shapes interpersonal communication and of late has focused her research on social networking sites in particular.
Sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have revolutionized interpersonal relationships for the digital age, she said. Within these online communities, users share status updates, self-generated media, journal entries and other interpersonal communication with an ever-growing cadre of online friends.
The purpose is to reinforce established friendships and form bonds with new friends.
“They start in the mid-late 1990s based on this idea that Stanley Milgram had that everybody’s connected by six degrees of separation — and the first one was actually called ‘sixdegrees.com,’ ” said Baym.
“And they’re based on the premise that you’re more likely to want to get to know people who know people you already know than all-out strangers. So rather than a dating site that just has people putting up profiles and trying to randomly match, what if you could put up profiles of people that had shared friends. Wouldn’t those be more likely to succeed?”
The social networking model has boomed. Baym said the fastest-growing segment on Facebook, originally launched at Harvard for college students, now is people over age 35. The site currently claims more than 200 million active users.
Besides such impressive numbers is the enthusiasm such sites are generating, with many users frequenting social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook multiple times per day.
“Different people have different reasons for compulsive Facebook use,” Baym said. “But I think it comes down to the fact that there’s a continuous dribble — there’s always something new — so every time you go something has changed; somebody has updated their status; someone has sent you a request; someone has posted an item.
“So it’s a continuous link of hanging out in the halls with your friends between classes or hanging around the water cooler at the office.”
Baym recently has completed research on Last.fm, a niche site that connects fans of similar music. She found that online friendships based on common taste in music tended to be more fragile, although people also used the site to maintain closer relationships.
“What I found on Last.fm was that on average these relationships are not very strong,” said the KU researcher.
“Other people have described them as on average being weak ties, which means that you don’t discuss a wide range of topics. You don’t do a variety of activities together. You tend to be kind of specialized in what topics you talk about. You interact when you run into each other but you don’t seek each other out and your communication is confined to fewer media.”
Indeed, across the social networking sites, online friendships range from close relationships with strong ties to looser affiliations with less connectivity — but both types of friendships are useful.
“You can ask somebody, ‘Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?’ and people will say, ‘Oh, 30 or 40 or 50,’ ” said Baym.
“But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Because we do tend to cluster in relationships with strong ties to people that are pretty similar to ourselves. So they don’t necessarily know a whole lot that we don’t know. They haven’t necessarily been a lot of places that we haven’t been.
“They can’t volunteer to show us around Sydney, Australia, or give advice on a good reading on a topic. So there are all of these little bits of information and wisdom and social support that people can provide each other when they have a weak-tie relationship — and they can really open up access to resources that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Source: University of Kansas